Buckner & Garcia's "Pac-Man Fever" (1982)

Buckner & Garcia perform "Pac-Man Fever," from the 1982 album of the same name, on American Bandstand. I had this LP and the inner sleeve featured the patterns to maximize your score on the game. The title song hit #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. The second single, "Do the Donkey Kong," didn't do quite as well. Other tracks include "Froggy's Lament," "Goin' Berzerk," and "Ode to a Centipede." Due to rights issues, the currently-available "reissue" is actually a re-recording of the original music. The original LP can be easily found for around $40 or check your local thriftshops.

There are those who criticize Dr. Demento, but I feel I owe him for so much: National Lampoon’s “Deteriorata”, Camper Van Beethoven’s “Take The Skinheads Bowling”, Allan Lieberman’s “Thank God I’m A Jewish Boy”, Larry Groce’s “Junk Food Junkie”…

I also appreciate him filling in some of the background information on Barnes & Barnes’s “Fish Heads”, although I’d already been introduced to it a few years earlier, thanks to Nickelodeon’s “Turkey TV”.

And let’s not forget the tragically neglected “Mouse Trap”. Wikipedia reports that when they rerecorded the album in 1999, they were unable to find a machine and used sounds from nature, instead. Oddly, while Exidy’s founder generously released many of its old ROMs for non-commercial use with the MAME emulator a few years ago, Mouse Trap was not among them.

Was just thinking of this song, as the kids and I watched Wreck-It-Ralph, and if you wait through the credits, there’s a “Wreck It Ralph” theme song that sounded vaguely familiar. My 12-year-old, being 12, said “that’s cheezy”, and I said, “Well, I’m pretty sure it’s just a parody of Pac-Man Fever, which was a song when I was a kid…”

One little Google later, and lo and behold, “Wreck It Ralph” was written and sung by Buckner/Garcia!

Genius move. For a film already packed with videogame refs, that one’s the pixelated cherry on top.

This record is UNLISTENABLE. If you pay more than $10 novelty value for the LP you are really wasting money. There is a more novel 45 rpm single for Pac-Man Fever on square vinyl. This is generally worth more as it is really cool to display. There are a few of them for sale at Caveman Vintage in Chinatown in LA. Seriously, the music of Buckner & Garcia is about as bad as you can get. It’s my childhood, I was a huge Dementoid and still love novelty music, and synths, and odd things. On this record, they just don’t get it.

Just reading the headline was enough to plant this song firmly in my head. I don’t think I’ve heard it since I was 9. It was all over the place in 1982, regular radio play, not just Dr. Demento (that came later). I was also just hit with a flood of memories of being a young girl in that era. Good stuff.